Dac Technology Mature?

@frozentundra @jond Thanks for your kind words. PS Audio make some nice gear, though their designs as you pointed out have limited upgradeability. I see firmware updates for the dac as a kind of pandora’s box; you could just as easily subjectively move forward as backwards in sound.

A fully modular dac offers greater flexibility and would be more future proof which helps protect your investment. Vitus for example are offering a dac/streamer module for the new Vitus RI-101 integrated amp which supports Airplay, Roon, MQA, Tidal, Spotify, etc. And i’m told they are planning to offer a streamer module for my player in future.

Picking up on Shadorne’s comment, remember it’s all about implementation. And that comes down to the skill of the designer and the company’s manufacturing capacity. As I said, the digital part (incl: the dac chips) in total would contribute no more than about 15% or so to the complete sound. The psu and analog stage, combined with pcb layout matters more.

Mature?  I'd say exactly the opposite.  Although it's always existed, the differences between the delta-sigma DACs and the R2R and NOS multi-bit processors seems to be in its relative infancy.  Heck, we're still reconciling the convergence of tubes vs. solid state, and that's been going on for 40 years.  And digital technology is progressing at a faster pace than analog ever has.  So, five years from now I'd expect the digital processing landscape to look very different than it looks today.  The analog world, not so much.  So I guess mature is relative, and to me digital is the petulant teenager bursting with energy and embracing change in a fast-changing digital world. 

Mature, yes, in the sense that you can engineer tube amps that sound a lot like solid state, and solid state amps that sound a lot like tubes.  W.r.t. DACs, unless you go out of your way to engineer something that sounds a lot different from the crowd (which may or may not be a good thing), there's a lot of convergence doing on: different topologies, different chips, etc., end up with a sound that is really pretty similar--and which is only picked apart by audio reviewers looking for something to hang their hat on.

Hey my 20, 23 actually, year old DAC sounds just fine thanks! Love that old R2R technology, wedded to a robust power supply and tubed analog output stage of course.

Hey my 20, 23 actually, year old DAC sounds just fine thanks! Love that old R2R technology, wedded to a robust power supply and tubed analog output stage of course.

Same here. Old R2R; check.  Tube output stage; check.  Robust power supply check.  The only difference is that mine is *only* 16 years old.  As I stated in another post (I'll respond to that one shortly), my old 16 year old DAC sounds very close (but slightly better in some ways) than my newer DACs.